With their Young Son in Mind, Gay Parents Fight Marriage Ban

A continuous romp of beach days, flag football practices and like-minded cohorts in a wondrous place known as preschool. If bedtime comes too early and baths too regularly, that's just the price a 5-year-old must sometimes pay.

For the time being, he is unburdened by social injustice.

He isn't too worried that Momma and Mommy were denied a marriage license last week, or that they have joined five other couples in a lawsuit with Equality Florida to overturn Florida's same-sex marriage ban. He doesn't grasp that the women who adopted him when no other relatives wanted him are not a real family in the eyes of his community.

For now, Ethan knows only that he is loved by two parents.

"We're not trying to redefine marriage,'' his mother Melanie Alenier said. "Like everyone else, we believe it is a commitment between two people in a loving relationship. We're just saying it doesn't necessarily have to be one man and one woman.''

It's been a little more than five years since Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment that banned gay marriage in the state. It is not an exaggeration to say the world around us has changed since then.